Kim Young-sam, South Korean President Who Opposed Military, Dies at 87

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Young-sam, the former president of South Korea who replaced the last of the country’s military leaders, purged politicized generals and introduced a landmark reform aimed at transparency in financial transactions, died on Sunday in Seoul. He was 87.

The cause was sepsis and heart failure, said Oh Byung-hee, the chief of Seoul National University Hospital, where Mr. Kim was admitted with a fever on Friday. He had been treated for a series of strokes and pneumonia in recent years.

Mr. Kim, an outspoken critic of military dictators from the 1960s through the 1980s, was president from 1993 to 1998.

He was one of the “three Kims” — the others were former President Kim Dae-jung and former Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil — who played major roles during South Korea’s turbulent transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Mr. Kim was born on Dec. 20, 1927, a son of a rich anchovy fisherman on Geoje Island, off the southeast coast of South Korea, when all of the Korean Peninsula was a Japanese colony.

He was elected to Parliament at 26 and developed a following as an opposition leader famed for his daring criticism of Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a coup in 1961 and tortured and imprisoned dissidents before his assassination in 1979.

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Mr. Kim waving during a parade on Feb. 25, 1993, in Seoul, after being sworn in as South Korea's 14th president.CreditYonhap/European Pressphoto Agency

Mr. Park had Mr. Kim expelled from Parliament for criticizing his dictatorship during an interview with The New York Times in 1979. Mr. Kim’s colleagues resigned from Parliament in protest, and huge antigovernment demonstrations broke out in Mr. Kim’s political home ground in the southeast. Mr. Park was assassinated by his spy chief later that year.

Mr. Kim’s travails continued when Mr. Park was replaced by Chun Doo-hwan, an army major general who engineered a coup to fill the power vacuum left by his patron’s death. Mr. Kim was barred from politics and put under house arrest. He once staged a 23-day hunger strike.

“Dawn will come even if the rooster is strangled,” he once said, a saying that became a catchphrase for Koreans yearning for democracy.

Mr. Kim had a lifetime rivalry with Kim Dae-jung, a fellow opposition leader from the southwest Jeolla region. They both ran for president in 1987 in South Korea’s first democratic election and split the opposition vote, allowing Mr. Chun’s handpicked successor, Roh Tae-woo, another former general, to win.

In 1990, Mr. Kim merged his party with Mr. Roh’s military-backed governing party in a move widely condemned as a betrayal of pro-democracy forces.

The merger was a political marriage of convenience: Mr. Roh wanted a parliamentary majority, and Mr. Kim, who distrusted Kim Dae-jung as much as he detested the military dictators, believed that he would never win the presidency as long as the other Mr. Kim competed with him for the opposition vote.

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Mr. Kim dragged off by plainclothes policemen in Seoul in 1986. He was an outspoken critic of military dictators from the 1960s through the 1980s.CreditHeesoon Yim/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Once in the governing party, whose top hierarchy included many former generals, Mr. Kim and his followers, vastly outnumbered by rival factions but all seasoned veterans in party politics, quickly expanded their ranks and dominated the party.

Mr. Kim beat Kim Dae-jung in the 1992 election to become the first civilian leader in South Korea in more than three decades.

Although he won with the support of the military-backed party, Mr. Kim did not forget his roots. He purged a clique of politically ambitious army officers who went by the name Hanahoe, which roughly meant “an association of one-for-all, all-for-one.” The officers were forced to retire.

Mr. Kim’s purge culminated in the arrest and conviction of Mr. Chun and Mr. Roh on mutiny and corruption charges for their roles in the 1979 coup and a bloody crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising the following year, as well as for collecting hundreds of millions of dollars each in bribes from businessmen. (Mr. Kim later pardoned them and released them from prison.)

Mr. Kim also barred South Koreans from owning bank accounts under pseudonyms. That change is considered a critical step in South Korea’s long-running campaign against corruption; bank accounts under borrowed names had been widely used by politicians and businessmen to hide slush funds.

But Mr. Kim’s time in office was also marked by missed opportunities.

In his memoir, Mr. Kim said he persuaded President Bill Clinton to cancel the United States’ plan to bomb North Korea’s nuclear facilities in 1994 for fear of war.

“Looking back,” Mr. Kim said in an interview in 2009, “I think the North Koreans think they can say whatever they want because no matter what they do, the Americans will never attack them.”

The 1994 nuclear crisis was defused when former President Jimmy Carter met with the North Korean leader at the time, Kim Il-sung, in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, and brokered what would have been the first summit meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas. But Kim Il-sung died of heart failure in July 1994, two weeks before the meeting was to take place.

”Fate played a trick on me,” Mr. Kim said. “If I had met Kim Il-sung, I would have changed the nation’s history.”

It fell to his rival and successor, Kim Dae-jung, to hold the first summit meeting with the leader of the north. In 2000, Kim Dae-jung flew to Pyongyang and met with Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung’s son and successor. That year, Kim Dae-jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

By the time Kim Young-sam ended his five-year term in early 1998, he was a disgraced lame duck.

In 1997, South Korea swallowed the humiliation of a $58 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund during the Asian financial crisis. Mr. Kim was criticized for failing to prevent the crisis by overhauling the country’s powerful family-run conglomerates.

Mr. Kim’s reputation was further tarnished with the arrest of a son on corruption charges. His governing party was so unpopular that South Koreans were ready to hand over power to the opposition for the first time, as they did with the election of Kim Dae-jung in late 1997.

Survivors include his wife, two sons and three daughters.

Reprinted from Sunday’s late editions.

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